Eighty percent of success is showing up.
—Woody Allen, from Love & Death
A few years ago I received an award from the YMCA.
The day the award was to be presented I looked around the crowded ballroom wondering why all those people were making such a fuss over me.
The only thing I could come up with was that I show up a lot.
When I was a young lawyer in the 1950s, I first became involved with causes in the community by joining the board of the YMCA, where I had spent many happy hours as a college student.
After a while, I decided I wanted to do more to show up in my community and help out in a hands-on way.
So along with doing pro bono law work, I started serving on committees and boards for everything from the chamber of commerce to school levy campaigns. Over time the nature of some of them changed and the number grew. At the same time my wife, Mary, was showing up for her own list of causes.
Why do I show up so much? Well, I suppose there are a lot of reasons.
I show up because I care about a cause. Or because I care about the person who asked me to show up. And maybe sometimes I show up because it irritates me when other people don't show up.
My obsessive showing up has become a joke among my children. Still, I notice they've picked up the habit. And frankly, that's what happened to me.
I started showing up because as far back as I can remember I watched other people I admired showing up.
In my hometown of Bremerton, Washington, showing up to lend your neighbors a hand was just something decent people did. My parents, on a scale of one to ten, were nines at showing up. My dad was somebody people knew they could count on. If there was money to be raised for a good cause, my dad was always willing to call on people and ask them to give a few dollars. He had led the effort to have a new park built in town. I read about it in an old newspaper long after he died. I had not known about it, but it didn't surprise me.
My mom showed up for a long list of community activities that included everything from picnics to fund drives.
My parents never talked about showing up. They just did it.
Another adult who provided me with powerful life lessons in showing up was our next-door neighbor, Dorm Braman. He showed up for so many things and accomplished so much in his life you'd have thought it would take two men to live Dorm's life.
Dorm owned a cabinet-making business and in his spare time he led our Boy Scout troop.
He was a remarkable man whose showing up touched a lot of lives. In fact, even though he had never graduated from high school, after we Boy Scouts were all in college, Dorm ran for mayor of Seattle and won. Later, he was appointed by President Richard Nixon as assistant secretary of transportation.
In the early years when he was our Scoutmaster, one weekend every month—rain or shine—Dorm took us on adventures that ranged from laid-back camping trips to arduous twenty-mile hikes through the Olympic Mountains.
One year he even acquired an old bus, added more seats to it, and took all of us to Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.
Far and away the most unforgettable memory I have of Dorm's showing up involved the building of what we called Camp Tahuya and Sundown Lodge.
This adventure began when Dorm decided our Boy Scout troop was going to acquire its own campsite and on it build a marvelous log lodge.
The first step was to persuade the local Lions Club to back the idea and buy the troop the land. We named the place Camp Tahuya after the river that ran through it.
Once we had the site, Dorm taught us how to clear land, fell trees, and build.
A lot has changed since then.
At that time, we felled the trees by hand and sawed the logs into proper lengths using two-man crosscut saws, and hand-peeled and planed them smooth and to proper dimensions using hand-wielded adzes. We had one power tool—a circular saw powered by Dorm's flatbed truck.
Building a log lodge is sweaty, gritty work. But this adventure proved to us that if we worked together long enough and hard enough anything was possible. Photo, 1938.
Every weekend for three summers we twenty teenagers, Dorm, and our assistant scoutmaster worked all day, cooked our meals over open fires, and slept under the stars.
After three summers of labor (plus that of countless weekends during the school year) we had our log lodge in the woods.
It was an imposing twenty-five-by-forty-foot structure with a main floor larger than most of our homes and a massive fireplace built by the father of one of the boys who was a stonemason. It had a large kitchen and a sleeping loft.
It is difficult to convey the extent of the work it took to build Sundown Lodge—or our sense of achievement in getting it done—to anyone who has never built a building from the ground up.
In the narrowest sense, it would be true to say that we learned to use a variety of common hand tools, build a complex structure, and grow calluses and a few scars where none existed before.
In a broader sense, we were witness to an example of visionary and inclusive leadership and the amazing power of people working together toward a common goal.
The lodge we built was big enough for all twenty members of Troop 511 and their parents to gather in. The physical structure of Sundown Lodge is long gone but the lessons we learned building it have spanned the generations. Photo, 1939.
All the showing up Dorm did in our lives gave shape to more than a log lodge in the woods. It gave shape to a place in our minds where we believed anything was possible.
